Starting Monday, MSN will grant use of Web DAV tools only to paid subscribers of Hotmail, which starts at $19.95. However, Hotmail subscribers who have previously used the technology, an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of its total 187 million customers, will be able to continue to use it for free through March or April of 2005.

"We've seen spammers exploiting this Web DAV protocol, and we're going to make a change to help curb its abuse. New spammers won't be able to set up of free accounts" to send junk e-mail, said Brook Richardson, lead product manager for MSN communications services.

Callers reporting faults to phone giants NTL yesterday were greeted by a recorded message telling them to f*** off.

A gruff man with a strong Geordie accent made the foul-mouthed announcement.

He said: "Hello. You are through to NTL customer services. We don't give a f*** about you. We are never here.

"We just will f*** you about, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just f*** off and leave us alone. Get a life."

It was on a line for call centres in Manchester, Swansea and Lanarkshire.

Company sources said an outside hacker breaking into the NTL system was the most likely culprit, though an employee with a grudge was not ruled out.

The American Conservative Union (ACU), which holds influential Republican activists and former senators on its board of directors, is running newspaper and magazine advertisements that take a humorous jab at the so-called Induce Act--and slams some conservative politicians for supporting it.

The original version of the Induce Act said that anyone who induces any violation of copyright law could be legally responsible, a phrase that has alarmed Silicon Valley manufacturers and led Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to say he would consider less sweeping alternatives.

The ACU's advertisement claims the Induce Act "attacks consumers' right to use technologies" and enriches "Hollywood fat cats." It is running in conservative-leaning publications including the Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and National Review.

John Fox from Hitachi Storage kicked off his presentation here by contrasting the price of storage when hard drives first appeared with the costs now.

The first hard drive in 1956 was the IBM 305 RAMAC, and cost $10,000 per MB – it had a capacity of 5MB.

But now the cost, Fox said, is something under 10 cents per MB and that he said, is a retail figure, including tax.

He said that the 3.5-inch drive factor is decreasing, and the real growth is in the 2.5-inch notebook. The car and the handheld consumer electronic markets are the additional spice, he said, that will help grow the market. Automotive vendors are adding hard drives and flat panel screens into the car.

If you've ever seen a smack-head handcuffed to a bed gibbering uncontrollably because he can't get a fix, then be afraid, because that's what you'll look like after two weeks of internet-free cold turkey.

While this cruel "qualitative" torture was inflicted on just 13 households containing 28 guinea pigs, a broader "quantitative" trawl of 1,000 web addicts found that 48 per cent of respondents could not go without the internet for two weeks. This unwillingness to even contemplate disconnection from the digital world was confirmed by Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard, who reported: "This study is entirely indicative of the myriad ways that the internet, in just ten short years of mainstream consumer consumption, has irrevocably changed the daily lives of consumers. This is true to the extent that it was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the internet for two weeks."

"It's a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser," said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP."

Microsoft affirmed that its recent security improvements to IE would be made available only to XP users.

"We do not have plans to deliver Windows XP SP2 enhancements for Windows 2000 or other older versions of Windows," the company said in a statement. "The most secure version of Windows today is Windows XP with SP2. We recommend that customers upgrade to XP and SP2 as quickly as possible."

That 49.2 percent of Windows users are left out in the cold when it comes to significant updates to IE and other software.

The internet's most popular search engine Google has been accused of supporting Chinese internet controls by omitting contentious news stories from search results in China.

Researchers at Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a US company that provides technology for circumventing internet restrictions in China, have discovered that the recently-launched Chinese version of Google News omits blocked news sources from its results.

Google admits to omitting some news sources within China but says this is meant to improve the quality of the service.

"In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons," says a statement issued by the company. "These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible."

Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft.

Google has wooed Joshua Bloch, one of the main developers of the Internet programming language Java, from Sun Microsystems.

The company also hired four people who worked on Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, and later founded their own company. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, but Microsoft's database-management program, Access.

The company, however, will be entering a segment of the storage market that is already crowded with such established players as Veritas Software. Analysts anticipate that Microsoft will focus on the low end of the market and later try to penetrate the high end, on which Veritas focuses.

"Customers are telling us that backing up and recovering their data is labor-intensive and complex," Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server Division, said in a statement. "Exponential growth of business-critical data and new government regulations are increasing the cost and complexity of backup and recovery, forcing companies to rethink their data protection planning."

Congratulations to all in the gaim team as they release for download version 1.0.0 (changelog). For those who don't know what gaim is, you could read the full answer on their site but for the lazy: 'Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.' Gaim is also the 2nd most active project on Sourceforge and the 4th most popular on Freshmeat and seemingly all round #1 Free IM client!